The accuracy of mobile location data is becoming increasingly more important with the increased popularity of mobile advertisements and location-based social platforms. However, the quality of mobile location data varies drastically from record to record. Aside from the wide variety of mobile devices (and the attendant location inaccuracies) that are used by the target population, each user can additionally select whether or not to use secondary location services, such as GPS or WiFi triangulation, to increase the accuracy of the reported location. For example, a smartphone can report a highly accurate location (e.g., accurate within a meter or two) when the on-board GPS radio is turned on, but reports only the location of the cell site to which the phone is connected when the GPS radio is turned off, allowing the margin of error to grow to hundreds of meters.
Furthermore, location data supplied by mobile service providers conventionally tend to be inaccurate, which leads to inaccurate device location estimation, absent a native application installed on the device. The inaccurate location data can subsequently result in inaccurate advertisements or other location-based services that are provided to the given device. The location determined by the mobile service provider can be inaccurate due to the capabilities of the cell tower, due to rounding or truncation errors (e.g., a longitude of −75.180817 is truncated to −75.1), due to a lack of secondary location data (e.g., GPS, WiFi triangulation, etc.), or due to any other suitable process that introduces location inaccuracy to the data. The device location determined by the mobile service provider can lack secondary location data because the mobile service provider does not collect or process the secondary location data, because the mobile service provider does not transmit or release the secondary location data (e.g., the mobile service provider has a native application on the device that collects the secondary location data but the service provider maintains the secondary location data as proprietary), because the user did not activate the secondary location data functionality or restricts secondary location data collection by the mobile service provider, or for any other suitable reason.